The Princess Bride

Occasionally, a DVD Special Edition is released with such thorough extras, reviewers can sit back in their hammocks and say, "My work here is done." The Princess Bride: Dead Pirate/Princess Buttercup Edition (two different covers are available) is one such case. Specifically, a 15-minute mini-doc titled "Love Is Like a Storybook Story," featuring literary scholars Helen Pilinovsky of Columbia University, Veronica Schanoes of the University of Pennsylvania, and novelist/screenwriter David Pesci will leave fans of the film so enlightened with insights and enthusiasms, it'll feel like a fresh coat of paint has been slapped onto a classic, bringing new life to that vintage model we all love.

Pilinovsky, Schanoes, and Pesci -- all huge fans of The Princess Bride film and novel -- lay out the complex evolution of fairy tales in straightforward terms, condensing the common tropes, themes, and traditions of fairy tales as they pertain to William Goldman's tongue-in-cheek updating of this classic narrative form. These talking heads seem to cover every relevant point about the film, from how the grandfather/grandson framing device (with Peter Falk and Fred Savage) carries on the oral tradition from which fairy tales first sprung to Vizzini (Wallace Shawn), Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin), and Fezzik (Andre the Giant) being something of a conflicted, three-headed monster. The scholars argue that, together, the three men possess a seemingly unstoppable combination of intelligence, cunning, and strength. But two-thirds of this monster is good (Inigo and Fezzik) and so the monster's body cannot hold.

Additionally, if you're wondering what it was like for screenwriter William Goldman to see his 1973 novel stall for over a decade in turn-around hell before finally getting made in 1987, his audio commentary (taken from a previous DVD release of TPB) will more than satisfy. Goldman is not afraid to bite the Hollywood hand that feeds him and has several peripheral anecdotes about what he thinks is wrong with Tinseltown as a business and as a place. Director Rob Reiner provides a separate, also previously available commentary that is more practical and laced with on-set anecdotes, but its inclusion here is still appreciated.

Extra features that have existed on previous DVD editions of The Princess Bride include the excellent "As You Wish" featurette, which includes extensive interviews with Reiner, Goldman, most of the primary cast members and a few producers. Most of these interviews were shot in the early 2000s, but are deftly combined with on-set footage and interviews from 1987. Cary Elwes' on-set "home movies," and a 1987 featurette promoting the film round out the double-dip features.

New to this edition is the thorough mini-doc already discussed, an amusing but ultra-lightweight "Battle of Wits" trivia game, and a "Miraculous Make-Up" featurette focusing on make-up artists' work on Billy Crystal and Carol Kane to flesh out (literally) the creation of the Miracle Max and Valerie characters. The final new feature of note is a "Fezzik's Guide to Florin" booklet.

Now that the basics have been covered and we can rely on the DVD's extra features to go deep cover in analyzing the film, this is a good chance to pose all those questions and observations that have piled up about The Princess Bride over the past twenty years of viewing and re-viewing this film, but I've never gotten the chance to ask. Here goes:

1. Is it just me or does The Princess Bride feels like the greatest high school play ever staged? From its boundless resourcefulness and cast of actors hamming it up at every turn to its finding imaginative solutions to complex problems and a sparseness of costume, make-up, and set design that reeks of a stretched-out budgetary dollar, this is the high school musical we all wanted to sit through, but so few of us actually did. Perhaps The Princess Bride's lasting, carved-into-the-bedrock-of-pop-culture appeal has something to do with its feeling like a high school do-over for all of us. And the fact that the film was made just before the emergence of CGI's dominance in Hollywood only adds to its organic, appealingly mechanical, rustic flavor.

2. Speaking of musicals, where are the songs? If an award was given out to movies that seem most like a musical without any actual musical numbers in them, The Princess Bride would win cold. And it's hard to believe this overwhelming "staginess" and feeling of phantom feet tapping isn't by design. The cast is full of actors who can sing and dance, extremely well in the case of Mandy Patinkim, but also notably in the case of Billy Crystal and Carol Kane. Andre the Giant was most famously a professional wrestler, a staged sport that is no stranger to melodrama and over-the-top theatrics. Many other cast members are as well-known for their stage work as their film work, perhaps even more so for their stage work (in the case of Wallace Shawn and Christopher Sarandon).

3. What do we make of Christopher Guest as King Humperdink's sidekick? Guest is almost unrecognizable here, but his presence as the co-screenwriter of This Is Spinal Tap (also directed by Reiner) is overwhelmingly a part of The Princess Bride's overall sense of tone and style, as is the prescient influence of his subsequent, self-consciously fuddy duddy improv movies, Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind.

4. The opening shot of this movie has always struck me as odd. That the very first shot is an unexpectedly jarring close-up of a pre-Nintendo baseball video game on a television screen and not some pastoral countryside or something otherwise "princessy" and "bridey" confounds audience expectations and prepares us for a ride mixing self-reflexivity and sincerity. But it also seems that something much bigger is going on. Remember the black-and-white, arcanely projected footage that opened Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (also written by Goldman) during that film's title sequence? These two openings seem related somehow, but I'm not sure why.

5. The grandfather/grandson framing device is also fascinating because of its aging '80s sensibility -- Savage's character wearing a Chicago Bears t-shirt, the baseball video game, not a cell phone or computer in sight -- is quickly blending into the past, alongside the tale of The Princess Bride itself. One day The Princess Bride may play like a fairy tale within a fairy tale.

6. "Where have you gone Rob Reiner? Remember when your movies didn't suck? Hey, hey, hey." Simon and Garfunkel should have been changed to the lyrics to "Mrs. Robinson" for Reiner's latest, Rumor Has It. I don't have the word count to discuss when and where Rob Reiner's directing career left the tracks for good, but looking back, it's hard not to give credit where credit is due. Reiner did such a good job of adopting screenwriter William Goldman's lead in telling The Princess Bride as a loving satire of fairy tales -- while at the same time being a great fairy tale itself -- that the whole affair becomes a nearly "inconceivable!" marriage of modernist critique and old-fashioned storytelling.

7. As with so many fairy tales, The Princess Bride feels like a tale of predominantly masculine concerns told through a much gentler, feminine perspective. The reluctant grandson (Fred Savage) fearing The Princess Bride to be a "kissing book," explicitly acknowledges the battle over whether this is most interestingly a story of true love or a tale of torture, revenge, and pirates. That Sony/MGM has re-released the movie as dual editions -- the Dread Pirate or the Princess Buttercup version -- further recognizes this duality. It is hard to believe The Princess Bride was made at the height of the Sylvester Stallone/Arnold Schwarzenegger heyday, but it was. Thankfully it's back and it's better than ever. -- Jason Woloski